Saturday, March 15, 2014

News from Ephesus: dream divination is applied science

Artemidorus, the most famous dream interpreter of the Hellenistic world, lived and practiced in the great temple city of Ephesus in Anatolia. Only one of his many books survives, The Interpretation of Dreams, or Oneirocritica. The title was borrowed by Freud many centuries later, but their approach could hardly be more different. While Freud is plumbing the basements of the personal subconscious, Artemidorus is searching in dreams for knowledge of the future that can be used for the good of an individual, a family or a whole community. The dreamer of Ephesus states his general objective at the start of his
book. He wants to make a rational and effective case for divination, based on
his personal experience and the case studies he has collected. He also wants to offer a practical guidebook that any intelligent reader can use. He gives his
credentials in his opening pages: “I have not only taken special pains to
procure every book on the interpretation of dreams, but have consorted for many
years with the much-despised diviners of the marketplace…In the different
cities of Greece and at the great religious gatherings of that country, in
Asia, in Italy and in the largest and most populous of the islands, I have
patiently listened to old dreams and their consequences.” His authority is based on
experience: “Everything has been the result of personal experience, since I
have always devoted myself, day and night, to the study of dream
interpretation.” [1]

Artemidorus
proceeds to distinguish different types of dreams. A fundamental difference is
between oneiros, which he defines as
a dream that “indicates a future state of affairs” and enhypnion – stuff “in sleep” – that “indicates a present state of
affairs”, ranging from the state of your digestion to your desire to be with
your lover or the haunting images of things that you fear. People who lead “an
upright life” try to discipline themselves to avoid being “muddled” by the
fears and desires reflected in such sleep experiences, which are the stuff of
much modern dream analysis In the Oneirocritica, Aretmidorus is interested only in dreams that reveal
the future, and especially in those that do this through allegory rather than by
literal depiction of possible scenes and events. Allegorical dreams are “those
which signify one thing by means of another.”

Artemidorus states bluntly, “The mind
predicts everything that will happen in the future.” He gives examples of precognitive dreams that presented future
events in an entirely literal way. A man dreams of a shipwreck and then his
boat is wrecked and he narrowly avoids drowning, as in the dream. Another
dreams he is wounded in the shoulder by a friend in a hunting accident, and
again the dream is played out exactly.

If it is possible to dream the future with this kind of
clarity, why do we need allegories? Artemidorus offers two reasons. The first is
that we may lack the experience to understand a future event perceived in a
dream – for example, because we have not yet encountered a person or situation
that features in the dream. By setting us a puzzle to figure out, the
“allegorical” dream gives us a rational way
to access what the larger mind knows about things to come. Second, the kind of
dream dramas Artemidorus describes can bring an emotional charge that leads to
action; “it is the nature of the oneiros
to awaken and excite the soul by inducing active undertakings.”

Artemidorus notes that while the gods do not lie, they like to speak in riddles. This
is because “they are wiser than we and do not wish us to accept anything
without a thorough examination”. He gives the example of a man who dreamed the
god Pan told him that his wife would poison him via his best friend. It was the
relationship that was poisoned, when the wife proceeded to have an affair with
the friend.

Artemidorus is very clear about what the Oneirocritica is, and what it is not. He is going to
show us how to decode allegorical dreams in order to discern the future. He is
well aware that other kinds of dreams require other kinds of dream work, and he
wrote about other types of dreams in books that have not survived, as well as a
book of augury – divination by bird-watching.

Artemidorus
recognized that every dream may be unique. The snake in your dream is not the
same as the snake in mine. To read the meaning of a dream symbol correctly, you
must know the dreamer’s identity, position in life, habits and medical
condition. You must also question the dreamer’s feelings
about a dream.

Artemidorus
observes that we dream the future for others as well as ourselves. Sometimes we
receive a dream message for someone else. “Many dreams come true for those
whose characters are similar to the dreamer’s and for his relatives and
namesakes.” Artemidorus gives the example of a woman who dreamed she was
married to a man who was not her husband. He observed that work with this dream
could proceed in several directions, including exploring the possibility that
it warned of death; “marriage and death signify each other because the
circumstances surrounding a marriage and a funeral are similar.” This association, it turned out, was on the right track, but it
was the dreamer’s sister, not the dreamer herself, who “married death” after
the dream.

Artemidorus kept
in touch with his clients after consultations, and apparently believed that
divination through dreams is for the benefit of the whole community. This
carries a burden. “If a man dreams that he has become a prophet and has been
celebrated for his predictions, he…will take upon himself, in addition to his
own anxieties, those of others.”

He wanted to
raise dream divination to the level of an applied science. In the view of one
modern scholar, Christine Walde, he succeeded. “The more complex aspects of
divination – which is the attempt to investigate the connections underlying
fate and the cosmos through natural and artificial means – constituted both an
ancient mode for mastering life and a way of gaining knowledge or insight that,
in the context of its time, can in no way be dismissed as irrational; at most,
it might be considered extrarational.” Artemidorus devised a “demystified”
approach to divination that “provides the standardized conditions that
scientific distance requires” and “an imposing reservoir of knowledge about
things in the world and their interdependence.” [2]

REFERENCES

1. All quotations from Artemidorus are from,
Oneirocritica: The Interpretation of
Dreams. Trans. Robert J. White. TorranceCA: Original Books, 1990.

2. Christine Walde, “Dream Interpretation in a Prosperous Age? Artemidorus, the Greek
Interpreter of Dreams” in David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa (eds) Dream Cultures: Explorations in the
Comparative History of Dreaming. New
York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1999,
pp. 126, 128.

9 comments:

A few days after returning from a visit with family, I dreamed my mother cooked some steak. I wondered why I was dreaming about something that had already happened. She then sent me an email saying she had cooked steak that day. lol. Is my life that boring or is a steak more than a steak?

I don't think it is boring to have such clear and simple confirmation of dream clairvoyance or telepathy. To get to the meat of the subject, I would say to myself: If I can have an accurate psychic dream of something as small as this, what else can I dream? I would also think about many reasons why I might want to be in active contact with my mother at this point in our lives.

It's a shame only one of his books survived. Who knows what kind of wisdom and experiences he could have shared in his other books. A funny concidence. Last week someone told me she had a dream of a snake which was wrapped around her arm. And she wondered what it could mean.I told her (quoting from your book: conscious dreaming) that I could not tell her what it could mean. Because a dream and the elements in the dream have a personal meaning. And the meaning of the dream is in the dream landscape itself.

Quite right, James. Yet we can offer feedback by saying "if it were my dream" and then offering our own associations without imposing them on the dreamer. Had I been asked about this dream, I might have said, "If it were my dream, I would reflect that Asklepios, the Greek god of dream healing, is often depicted with a snake wrapped around his arm. So I would wonder whether the snake here signifies a power of healing for myself or - through me - for others."

In one of your books you describe a healing ritual wherein you prepare for entering the temple in Ephesus and spend a night there dreaming.

I prepared for that ritual, preparing my mind, asking what I wanted to deal with, etc. While my request was very general, I did want to free myself of old memories that were negative and of no use.

I was amazed at the dream that came forth that night bringing forgiveness on both sides of the dream. For me, the dreamer and the persons that appeared in the dream. This dream brought up old wounds, grievences to forgiveness and a lightness of the heart.

Naomi, it sounds like you discovered - as did the ancient pilgrims who journeyed to the temples of dream healing associated with Asklepios - the depth of healing and guidance that is available to us from a deeper source when we ask in the right way. I have written about the Asklepian experience of dream healing in several of my books, including DREAMGATES and THE SECRET HISTORY OF DREAMING. As you discovered, this works! Thanks for sharing.

Hi Robert, thanks for your response. My friend and I, along with a few others, are practicing to get lucid dreams. She told me in her dream the snake was around her arm en started to squeeze her arm. I was wondering if the snake wanted to help her in her dream to get lucid. By squeezing her arm, making the dream a little more uncomfortable, making her aware she was dreaming.

But yes the image of Asklepios with a snake wrapped around his arm has a strong resemblance. I'm going to ask her how she feels about that image.

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